6: Revelation and Miracles - the Kuzari Principle

I will now be presenting a key argument concerning
the belief in miracles. This argument was originally formulated
by the Kuzari, a classical work of Jewish philosophy by Rabbi
Yehuda Halevi. The Bible records many miraculous events. Verifying
these reports is necessary: first, to verify the Bible as an accurate
record of historic events, and second, as evidence for G-d's role
in history. Therefore, this argument plays a crucial role in
the overall assessment of evidence for the truth of the Torah.

I will present this argument twice because it is
not a simple argument. First I will present it incompletely in
outline form, and then I will take you through it in detail.
We begin by taking a miracle which is described as occurring to
a large number of people, in our case the entire generation.
Take, for example, the revelation at Sinai. There are people
who believe that the revelation at Sinai occurred. I'm not going
to assume that because people believed it that it must have occurred.
That is called "begging the question." However, it
is a fact that there are people who believe it occurred.

Now they believe it because the previous generation
taught it to them. Likewise, that generation believes it because
the previous generation taught it to them. So you have a chain
of generations of believers going back in time. That is a fact.
The question then is, how did the chain get started? Who were
the first believers? How did they arrive at their belief?

Again, oversimplifying, (this is only the outline):
There are two broad possibilities. One: the event at Sinai took
place and people witnessed it, and that caused their belief. Or
two: the event did not take place. If the event did not take
place, then someone invented the story and convinced the people
to believe it.

The Kuzari's argument proceeds by investigating
the second alternative, that the event didn't happen, that the
story was made up and was sold. The argument shows that the second
alternative is not credible. It is not credible to believe that
the story was made up and then sold. If you can defeat the second
alternative, that leaves only the first alternative, that it happened
and was witnessed. That is the structure of the argument.

The outline of the refutation of the second alternative
proceeds as follows. Imagine someone making up the story and trying
to sell it. He is going to come to a group of people and he is
going to tell them that sometime in the past their ancestors stood
at a mountain and heard G-d speak. He is not talking about people
in China or Tibet. He is talking about the ancestors of his audience.
He is claiming that G-d revealed Himself to all of their ancestors
simultaneously and by so doing founded a new religion.

What is the question with which the audience will
confront him? The obvious question is: If this happened to our
ancestors, how is it that no one knows about it but you? What
happened to the memory of that event? Everybody simply forgot
it? They were more interested in the soccer scores? No one told
us about it? The whole religion just disappeared? It is simply
not credible to tell an entire nation that their collective ancestors
witnessed such an earth-shattering event and that it was forgotten.
It would be impossible to explain why the memory of the event
disappeared. Therefore, says the Kuzari, the person inventing
the story and trying to sell it will never succeed.

To give you a simple parallel, suppose someone told
you today that five hundred years ago gold grew on trees throughout
Romania. Gold grew on trees for twenty years and then there was
a blight that killed all the gold trees. Would you believe it?
Would you have to go to an encyclopedia and look up Rumanian
history? I don't think that you would need to investigate the
history of Rumania. If such a thing had happened, you would already
know about it. It would have been so spectacular that everyone
would know about it. The books would be filled with it; novels
would have been written about it; there would be botanical research
projects to find out what happened to the gold trees and how to
reproduce them. It is not the kind of thing that people forget.

Or, to take an example which does not involve a
miracle, imagine being told that in 1690 the European settlers
in North America conquered all of Central and South America. You
would reject such a statement on the same grounds: if it were
true, surely we would already know it.

Similarly, the revelation of G-d to an entire ancestry
of a nation is not the kind of event that would be forgotten;
and therefore if a person is inventing the story and trying to
sell it, he will not be able to sell it to his audience. The
reason is that he will not be able to explain why no one else
remembers that incredible event. That means that the alternative
of making it up and selling it is not credible. If that alternative
is not credible, we are left with only one alternative, and that
is that the event really happened and that people witnessed it.
That is the general structure of the argument in an incomplete
and outlined form.

Now, let me take you through the argument in detail.
It will be considerably longer this time. The first point again:
we have a chain of generations going backwards in time who believe
that these miracles took place: Revelation at Sinai, the crossing
of the Red Sea, the plagues in Egypt, the manna and others. Today,
this group constitutes hundreds of millions of people. (Some
Jews, and some Christians, some Moslems, etc.) The question is:
How did that belief originate? It is not of interest now that
there are non-believers. There will always be non-believers.
There are even non-believers in the Holocaust. (How there can
be people who do not believe in the Holocaust will be discussed
below.) What is at issue is that there are believers, a considerably
large number of believers, and we want to explain the fact that
they believe it. It is a psychological and sociological fact
that they believe it. How did this belief first arise?

Now, in modern language the principle that the Kuzari
uses is as follows. I beg you to look at it, hear it, and pay
close attention to all of its details. Let E be a possible
event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence of its occurrence. If the evidence
does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred.

Let's consider a possible event, that is to say
an event about which we don't know whether or not it occurred.
Let's suppose it is an event which if it had occurred, it would
have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence.
Well, if we don't have the evidence then we will not believe
it occurred.

That's what the principle says. Let's try to put
it in simpler terms. Someone is trying to convince me that a fictitious
war, or an earthquake, or something like that happened. If he
is right that it (the war, earthquake, etc.) really happened,
I should know about it already. I shouldn't need him to tell me.
Then the principle tells me that I will not be convinced by him.
The problem of the missing evidence will prevent me from believing
him.

Of course, when I say that "people will not
believe," I don't mean that no one will believe. After all,
there are people who believe in flying saucers, or that they are
Napoleon, or that the earth is flat! What I mean is that you will
not be able to get the vast majority of a nation to accept such
a view about their own ancestors when no one in fact remembers
it.

So, for example, here is a possible event of the
right type: a volcanic eruption in the middle of Manhattan in
1975. If that had happened, that would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence to all of us today. If a volcanic eruption
had really occurred in 1975, there would be newspaper reports,
books, there would be signs in New York of the lava under the
concrete and so on. And I could say to myself: "If he is
right that the volcanic eruption really happened, I should know
about it already. I shouldn't need him to tell me." That
is why we would not believe someone who tried to convince us that
it happened.

Similarly with gold growing on trees throughout
Romania five hundred years ago. Even if the event took place
five hundred years ago in such a remote spot as Rumania, the social
memory of that event would have left behind enormous, easily available
evidence of its occurrence. And we could make the same observation:
If gold really grew on trees we should know about it ourselves
without this person having to tell us.

That is the kind of event that we are talking about.
An event which, if it had happened would have left behind an
enormous amount of easily available evidence of its occurrence.
I stress this because the counter-examples that people usually
think of are mistakes because they will not respect the definition.

The application of this principle to public miracles
follows directly. A public miracle, especially a miracle which
is described as occurring to an entire nation, is the kind of
event which if it had happened would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence of its occurrence. The evidence would
be in the form of social memory, just like the evidence we would
have had of gold growing on trees throughout Rumania. People
don't forget things like that. Therefore a public miracle, public
in the large sense of a whole nation, is the kind of event which,
if it did happen, would leave behind enormous, easily available
evidence of its occurrence. If the event did not take place, and
therefore the evidence was missing, you cannot get people to believe
in it. That is how the Kuzari principle applies to public miracles.

Now, let me explain to you how limited this principle
is. This principle states a limit on human credulity. People
throughout history have believed a wide variety of crazy things.
This principle says that there is a limit to how foolish people
will be. They will believe a wide variety of crazy things, but
not every crazy thing. There is a limit. The limit is
an event which if it had happened would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence of its occurrence, and which in fact
didn't happen and therefore the evidence was missing.

Let me give you some examples. In the Middle Ages,
people in Europe believed in dragons. Doesn't that demonstrate
that you can sell anybody anything? Think about the kinds of beliefs
that they had about dragons. Here is one belief that they never
entertained. People did not believe that a dragon marched into
downtown London in the middle of the day, burnt hundreds of people
to death with its fiery breath, knocked over buildings with its
tail, and then drowned in the Thames. Why not? If you can sell
people anything, if you can make up any story and get credulous
people to believe it, how is it no one ever believed that?

What kinds of stories did they believe about the
dragons? Sir Galahad comes riding in from the forest, his armor
is dented, he's bruised and bleeding. "What happened Sir
Galahad?" "I had an encounter with the dragon."
Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn't. The listener have no
way of checking it out. Even if it did happen, it would not
leave behind enormous, easily available evidence to him of
its occurrence. Since it doesn't meet the condition of leaving
behind enormous, easily available evidence, you can sell him anything.
As long as the audience would have no access to evidence even
if the event occurred, the audience has to decide whether to trust
the witness or not. If he is tall, if he is handsome, if he writes
sonnets, if he is good at jousting, then maybe he will be believed.
Why? Because he describes an event which even if it had happened,
would be inaccessible. If you describe it as inaccessible, may
be able to sell anything.

Achilles comes down from the mountain and he says,
"I just met Athena and she gave me a new strategy for the
war." Now, if you are in the Greek camp down below, you
have no access to evidence. You don't know what happened on the
mountain top. At that point, all bets are off. At that point
you may be able to get people to believe without limit. Only
when you have an event which meets the Kuzari's conditions, an
event which if it had happened would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence of its occurrence to the audience, are
you out of luck and not able to sell it. That is what the Kuzari
says.

Take, for example, Christian "miracles."
Many people feel that if we had a good reason to believe in miracles,
we would be embarrassed by Christian claims to miracles. There
are two things wrong with this worry.

Number one, we have no commitment against Christian
miracles. As far as we are concerned, maybe the Christian miracles
did take place, because in Judaism, miracles alone prove nothing.
It says in Deuteronomy, Chapter 13, that there will be false
prophets who will do miracles! So, if someone tries to prove
that he has a message from G-d by strolling on the lake, that
proves nothing. It could be that he is one of the false prophets
who does miracles. So I have no particular commitment against
Christian miracles. If they happen to have occurred then they
would qualify for chapter 13 (Deuteronomy)!

Number two, the Christian miracles were by and large
semi-private affairs witnessed by no more than a few thousand
people. Now a few thousand people, if you are making up the story
fifty years later, is by no means the entire ancestry of a nation.
The audience will ask themselves: "If it really happened,
must I assume that everyone at that time would have believed it
and then created a social memory which would have been available
to me today? Maybe they just did not believe it? Perhaps it was
filed with the many stories of the current Greek mystery cults
and just forgotten?" Perhaps so, and then the Kuzari principle
does not apply. Only if the audience is convinced that if the
event had happened they surely would have known of it does the
principle apply. In this case the audience would not necessarily
have been convinced.

Perhaps the following analogy will help. Imagine
that you spent yesterday in the library. A friend now wants to
convince you that you went swimming yesterday. You are not likely
to accept his story. Your reason will be this: If I really went
swimming yesterday, surely I would remember it! The fact that
you should remember it if it happened and in fact you don't
remember it is enough for you to reject it. On the other hand,
if your friend tells you that you absentmindedly put your eyeglass
case on top of the radio you might well believe him. You will
reason: Even if I did that, I would probably not remember doing
it. So the fact that you do not remember it is not enough reason
to reject it. We have used the same reasoning for national events.

Now, some people confuse the Kuzari's principle
with its converse in the following way. They say you are trying
to claim that enormous, easily available evidence is very powerful,
powerful enough to wipe out all opposition, powerful enough to
settle all issues. What about people today who do not believe
in the Holocaust? The Holocaust took place only fifty years ago.
There is enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence.
You could talk to thousands of survivors who are still alive
today. There are books, records, photographic materials, death
camps that you can visit, and yet there are people today who don't
believe in the Holocaust. Doesn't that show that enormous, easily
available evidence doesn't settle all questions?

The answer is yes, it does show that, but that is
not what the Kuzari's principle says. The Kuzari's principle says
that for an event which if it had occurred would
have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its
occurrence, and didn't occur, you can't get people to believe
in it

What would you need to show that this principle
is false? You would need an event which did not occur, and yet
people believed in it. That would show that the principle is
false. You would need an event for which you would expect to
find evidence, the evidence is missing because the event did not
happen, and yet people managed to believe in it. Now with the
Holocaust you have the opposite. Here you have an event
which did occur and yet people don't believe it
did. That is not a counter-example to the principle. It is the
opposite.

Now some will say: "Okay, that is a fine point
of logic, it did occur, it didn't occur, you do believe it, you
don't believe it, but still, isn't it really the same thing?
Doesn't it come down to the same thing that such evidence doesn't
settle all questions?"

The answer is no, it does not come down to the same
thing. There is a crucial difference between the Kuzari's principle
and the case of the Holocaust. The reason is that everyone has
to sift and be selective when he considers evidence for a proposition.
Sometimes evidence is fabricated, sometimes the evidence is irrelevant,
sometimes it is misinterpreted. We are always sifting, rejecting,
and accepting, and reinterpreting. Only then do we decide what
conclusion to draw from the evidence. When we come to the Holocaust,
these nuts say we know that sometimes evidence is fabricated
or misleading: in this case all of it is fabricated or misleading.
In other words, they are taking a normal part of human cognitive
life and extending it beyond its appropriate boundaries. They
say that sometimes you have to reject some evidence
proposed for a proposition; in the case of the Holocaust they
want you to reject all the evidence as sufficient to believe
it.

Now you can imagine that happening at least on the
fringes of society. But the case of the Kuzari is the opposite.
To violate the Kuzari principle we have to believe something for
which all the expected evidence is missing. If it were true that
there ought to be evidence, and there isn't any evidence, we would
never accept a belief. That is not part of our normal cognitive
life. We are never confronted with a case where if it had happened
the evidence ought to be all over in front of me and there is
no evidence, and yet I leap over that hurdle and believe. Therefore,
the disbelievers in the Holocaust are irrelevant to the Kuzari's
principle.

[Some will wonder whether we have avoided the objection
only by defining the event positively, i.e. as the occurrence
of the Holocaust. There is no reason in principle, they will say,
that we could not consider the non-occurrence of the Holocaust
as an equally bona fide event. How would we avoid the objection then? Well, let's try to see how the objection would go.

The non-occurrence of the Holocaust (the second
World War without the massacre of 6,000,000 Jews) is a possible
event. If it had happened - if the second World War had not included
the massacre of 6,000,000 Jews - then there would be enormous,
easily available evidence of that event. The evidence would be
in the form of histories of the second World War making no mention
of the Holocaust. The absence of the event from the histories
would surely be compelling evidence that the event did not take
place. Since the evidence is in fact missing - the histories
of the second World War do in fact include the Holocaust - the
Kuzari principle says that people should not believe in the event.
That is, they should not believe in the non-occurrence of the
Holocaust.

I think this argument is correct: the Kuzari principle
predicts that you cannot get people to believe that the Holocaust
did not occur. But the prediction is in fact correct! More than
ninety per cent of contemporary Americans believe in the Holocaust.
The Kuzari principle does not say that no one will accept such
a belief. For any kind of craziness you can find some believers!
It says that a whole society will not accept the occurrence of
an event when it lacks the evidence it should have had if the
event had occurred. That has not happened in the case of the Holocaust.
And even if it were to happen in the future (G-d forbid) that
a great number of Americans come to disbelieve the Holocaust,
that would still not be directly relevant to our use of the Kuzari
principle since the Holocaust did not happen to their ancestors.
Since to them it is a foreign event, perhaps they can explain
to themselves why they do not possess the expected evidence. This
will have no bearing on the ability of the descendants of the
witnesses themselves to explain their lack of the relevant evidence.]

Now let's examine the principle itself. What kind
of principle is this? At base it is a principle of empirical
psychology. It is a principle describing how people come to
believe things. It says that under certain conditions, beliefs
won't form. People will not come to believe in events that the
Kuzari's principle forbids.

Why should we accept this principle? After all,
everything relies on this principle. Could we defeat it? Here
is one way not to go about it. We should not say: "You
are telling me that just because it is an event that if it had
happened would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence,
that you can't get people to believe it? I don't think that is
right. I can imagine very well that a very influential priesthood,
or a very powerful leader, or a person whom you would think has
magical powers, convincing people to believe in even things like
that. I don't think there is any limit to what the populace can
believe. I think I could even write a very convincing novel describing
such a case and get it published."

Does your ability to imagine such a case
defeat the principle? The answer is no. This is a principle
about real people in the real world. The principle doesn't say
anything about your imagination. People can imagine all sorts
of things. They can even imagine impossible things. People have
imagined squaring a circle; it just happens to be mathematically
impossible. I know people who imagine machines that run without
loss of any energy. There are people who design them every year.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it is impossible,
yet they do it anyway.

The limits are on your imagination are is of no
interest. The question is: Do real people in the real world
accept beliefs like that? The only way to defeat the Kuzari's
principle is to find real cases. Real cases of communities
that have come to believe events which if they had happened would
have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence,
and didn't happen, and therefore the evidence wasn't present.
I have never yet come across such an event, nothing even remotely
resembling such an event.

I'll give you some more examples of non-contenders.
People say: "Didn't the vast majority of Germans believe
that the Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the first World
War? Didn't they believe that Jews had control of international
business and banking?" Of course they believed those things,
but put yourself in the position of the average German shopkeeper
or bus driver. You are told thirty years later that the Jews
stabbed them in the back in the first World War. (Even the description
is important. When someone stabs you in the back, you don't see
them.) What kind of back-stabbing are they describing? Do they
say for example that during the first World War that Jews lay
down in front of German tanks and stopped them from moving? No,
they don't say that, because they know that if they say that,
no one will believe it. After all, the soldiers in that war
were still alive. They know that didn't happen. No, they stabbed
us in the back. They covered their tracks and nobody ever caught
them. Because if you claim that it happened in public, nobody
will believe you.

Again, put yourself in the position of the average
German shopkeeper and bus driver. You are told that the Jews
control the international business community. Could you get evidence
about that? Of course not, there is no way for you to check that
claim. Even if it were true you would not have the evidence.
Then people may believe anything. As long as you make the
claim something which, even if it were true, your audience would
not have the evidence, then the audience has to decide whether
you are credible or not and people can make awful mistakes about
that.

That is why the claim of the Nazis that the bigger
the lie the more successful it will be is wrong. It is a mistake,
because a really big lie would have been to lie about something
that everyone experienced. They didn't do that, because you can't
lie about that which everyone should have experienced, because
if it had happened it would have left behind enormous, easily
available evidence of its occurrence.

Some people ask about the massacre in Tiananmen
Square. Almost everyone in China believes that the students
massed against the soldiers and attacked them and the soldiers
fired in self-defense. Correct, but if you live in Shanghai,
could you get evidence as to what happened in Tiananmen Square?
How would you get it? There is no evidence available to you
except what is played out on Chinese television, and that is controlled.
So again, the vast majority of people in China would not have
evidence even if the massacre occurred. Under those conditions
you can sell them anything.

So, the principle asserts that you cannot create
beliefs of this kind. The principle rests simply on the experience
of mankind that people don't believe these sorts of things. If
they don't believe these sorts of things, then when you have such
an event, as for example a public miracle, if people do believe
it, the alternate scenario of its having been made up has now
been discredited. That being the case, the only thing that is
left is to accept the event as having occurred.

Now there are two qualifications. First of all,
when you have an account of a miracle, part of what you rely
upon is the reliability of the description of the miracle. Maybe
something happened, but who says that the description of what
happened is accurate? Maybe the people who witnessed it misunderstood
it. Maybe they misperceived it. What criteria do I need in order
to lend credence to the particular description of the event that
I get from the witnesses?

An eye witness report is made compelling by the
following factors. Calm: If they were upset, anxious,
afraid, if the event astounded or stupefied them, that may cast
some doubt on their ability to describe the event appropriately.
Repetition: rarely are miracles repeated. If they
are repeated, the more times that they are repeated, the more
credible and compelling the eye witness account becomes. Corroboration:
How many people witnessed the event? If it is one or two then
it is less compelling. If it is thousands or tens of thousands
it becomes more compelling. Irrelevance of expertise:
You do not want a witness drawing a conclusion which he is not
equipped to draw. If I visit an atomic laboratory, and I come
out and you ask: "Was the cyclotron on?" And I say
"Well, the machine in the corner was blinking its lights
red and blue, but I don't know if it was the cyclotron or whether
it was a coffee machine. I don't know what it was. I can't tell
those things!" You do not want a witness drawing conclusions
that he does not have the expertise to substantiate. Absence
of self interest: If a person has an interest in telling
the story one way or another, then you can suspect that he is
motivated by self-interest.

Now, I said the presence of all these factors makes
the report compelling. What does that mean if one or more of
the factors is missing? Does that mean that the report is worthless?
No, it just means that it is less compelling. But even
when the evidence is less compelling, it can be compelling
enough. The lack of the cited factors leads to doubt when
there is contrary evidence. If the witnesses report seeing
A kill B, and we have evidence that A was elsewhere at the time,
we may use the witnesses' fright and shock at seeing a murder
to explain the innaccuracy of their report. But if there is no
contrary evidence, we will accept their report as good enough
(even to convict in court).

Now Rav Yehuda Halevi, who created this argument,
applied it most directly to the miracle of the manna. If I were
looking at the Bible for outstanding miracles, I don't think that
I would choose the manna. It is not so spectacular, they just
ate something they found on the ground every morning for thirty-nine
years. The reason he chose this is because it fits the conditions
that we previously described perfectly.

It is something that happened thousands of times.
Maybe the first few times they were astounded or stupefied and
in shock, but after the thousandth time or the ten-thousandth
time, I cannot imagine that they were still in such shock that
they could not calmly investigate what is taking place. You have
here repetition galore. Corroboration? It is something that was
witnessed by an entire nation. You cannot find much greater corroboration
than that. Irrelevance of expertise? You do not have to be an
expert to know that every morning you woke up, scooped the stuff
off the ground and ate it and it nourished you. That is not drawing
conclusions about cyclotrons.

As far as the application of self-interest is concerned,
this can be ruled out in the following manner. We are talking
now about an event being misreported. How could self-interest
have created the story of the manna if it didn't happen? It couldn't
have been created later than the event even if they had wanted
to make it up, because that is a direct application of the Kuzari's
Principle. If you make it up later, people will ask you, if it
really happened to all of our ancestors, how come no one knows
about it but you? It is not the kind of event you can make up
because if it had happened, it would have left behind enormous,
easily available evidence of its occurrence, and if it didn't
occur, then there is no evidence of its occurrence. So, you could
not make it up later.

Could self-interest have produced a false report
while the event was going on? Clearly not. We are talking about
an event which repeated thousands of times. It was experienced
by an entire nation. Who is going to make a false report of it
when everybody experiences it every day and sees that the report
is false? So, even if there were self-interest, it could not
play a role here in creating a false report of the event. Therefore
says the Kuzari, the manna is the strongest candidate for a credible
miracle. It is credible because of its public nature, and the
reports about what happened are credible because they meet all
the conditions we have discussed.

The application of the Kuzari principle to other
miracles, like the Revelation at Sinai and the crossing of the
sea, is somewhat less compelling. They happened only once and
they took place at a time when the people were in a very agitated
state of mind. Therefore, one would have to scale down the credibility
of the details in the descriptions of these miracles. They
are somewhat less compelling than they would have been if the
people had been calm and the miracles had been repeated. But,
as noted above, even for the details the evidence is compelling
enough since there is no contrary evidence. Furthermore, if we
consider the general descriptions of these miracles - leaving
out the fine details - the Kuzari principle applies directly with
full strength.

There is also a kind of domino effect here. If
you have one miracle which you can strongly substantiate, one
miracle for which the argument is perfect, once you breach the
natural order, it then becomes possible to accept the account
of other miracles more easily. I'll give you an analogy. Suppose
you have a person whom you believe to be honest in a business
and there is money missing from the business. Someone accuses
this honest fellow. You are not likely to accept the accusation
even if there is some evidence that he was in the right place
at the right time. You say: "I know him to be an honest
fellow. Therefore I cannot suspect him."

Now, let's suppose you find one incident in which
he is known to have cheated. Just one. That changes the entire
picture. Now you know that he isn't completely honest. Then,
when you have evidence that he was in the right place at the right
time, you take it seriously. Once you broke the consistent picture
of honesty, then he becomes suspected of any misdoings that take
place.

Similarly here: if you can believe in nature without
exception, it is difficult to argue that there was a breach of
nature. But once you have argued successfully that there was a
single breach of nature, it becomes easier to argue for other
breaches of nature in the future. Now the argument for the manna
is extremely powerful and conclusive, even including the details,
as is the general description of the other national miracles.
Therefore, standards of evidence for the records in Jewish sources
of private miracles are reduced. Here we invoke the principle
that all of a single body of information receives credibility
from the parts that are tested and found true.

Now let me come finally to the most natural and
strongest opposition to this argument. Let's go back to the revelation
at Sinai. I said that there are two possibilities: Either the
event took place or it was made up. But it cannot be made up
since people will not believe in an event whose necessary evidence
is missing.

Now the objection will be that this is too simplistic
a classification, that there is really a third intermediate possibility.
They didn't just make it up. Something happened, and that something
was gradually transformed by telling the story, adding, and embellishing.
The gradual transformation of imperfect information went together
with wishful thinking, glorifying your ancestors, and all the
other motivations. This kind of gradual embellishment is well
known by anthropologists. It is called myth formation and
it definitely takes place in other nations. Why can't stories
like the Revelation at Sinai, or the manna, or the crossing of
the Red Sea have at their base some event that really did take
place, but then was gradually glorified into a miracle?

There are two problems with this sort of "explanation."
One general problem is this: when you fill in the details of
the scenario it tends to become extremely implausible. Only by
ignoring the details does the scenario gain any initial interest.
When you ask for the details of the original natural event, how
it was understood by the people who experienced it, how they described
it to their children, how the reports started to change etc.,
the story becomes much less consistent with normal human psychology.
The second problem is equally fundamental: If you think that an
event which was a natural event gradually glorified into this
kind of supernatural event, and you think that is normal, and
a natural process for a society at that time, then there ought
to be parallels. The Kuzari's principle is an empirical principle.
You can defeat it. You merely need to find cases. It is not
enough to dream up a scenario. You need to find real parallels.

Let's take the manna as an illustration of both
problems. There is a book called The Bible As History by
Werner Keller who claims that the miracle of the manna "really
took place." Here is his story. The Jews left Egypt, and
there are bushes in the Sinai desert to this day which are periodically
attacked by insects which bore holes in the trunk of the bush.
A sap which is sweet and nourishing oozes out, and the Jews ate
this sap as they traveled through the desert. (He claims that
this makes the Bible into History. Of course this really makes
the Bible false. The Bible doesn't say anything about bushes
and sap. The Bible says that they found the manna scattered all
over the desert every morning. ) Now here is the suggestion.
Every morning they went out and ate the sap of the bushes, and
then later it became gradually transformed into the story of a
miracle.

Now, as I said, you cannot trust your imagination.
The question here is an empirical one. First let's try to face
the first problem by filling in the details. The people who left
Egypt ate the sap. Did they think it was a miracle? Presumably
not. Those bushes have been in existence for over three thousand
years. Presumably they were there before the Jews left Egypt.
Everyone knew about them. It was a well known desert phenomenon.
For them to go out and eat that which everyone knows about, and
for them to experience it as a miracle with a quite different
description is incredible. They knew they were eating sap!

They went into the land of Israel. What did they
teach their children? Did they tell them a completely different
story? Of course not. They experienced it. The vast majority
of people alive experienced it. They couldn't simply discontinue
the old story and make up a brand new story on the spot that everybody
tells the same way. No, they must have told their children about
the same story.

Well how did the breakdown occur? We can imagine
little Reuven sitting and listening to stories from his great-grandfather.
And the great-grandfather has become senile, his mind wanders,
he gets the details wrong, he makes up a few things and so on.
Reuven comes the next morning to play with his friends and says:
"Boy, do you know what great-granddad told me yesterday?
He told me this great story about all these things..."
What will all the other children say? "Gee, my father never
told me about that." They go home and ask their father,
and their father says Reuven's great-grandfather is 116 years
old. People like that make up stories. One of the things needed
is a credible scenario of the story developing put into a real
social context. Here it is quite difficult to imagine how it
could occur.

But more than that. Here you have an event that
when it was experienced was a natural event, and the event
continues to occur. The bushes still exist. People are
still eating the sap from those bushes year after year. The above
scenario says that under these conditions, the story was gradually
elevated into the level of a miracle. Now we come to the second
problem. I challenge you to find me a parallel. It is
not enough to make it up in your imagination. Find a parallel.
Find a group of people who experienced an event as a natural
occurrence, who interpret the event as a natural occurrence, the
event continues to occur regularly in their vicinity, and in spite
of all that they elevate it into an account of a miracle. If
you find such occurrences then that will weaken the argument here.
I do not know of any such parallel.

The same has to be true with respect to every
scenario. First of all, the scenario has to be initially plausible.
Most scenarios are not even initially plausible, but even if they
are, there must also be real parallels. Let's apply this now to
the revelation at Sinai.

Here is the proposed "explanation"
of the belief in revelation at Sinai in terms of myth formation.
Maybe the Jewish people were in the desert and there was a volcanic
eruption or an earthquake. These are very startling events.
These are very shocking events. They might even have been regarded
as supernatural. Then maybe later people told them that they
heard voices, saw visions and so on, and all of that was elevated
into the story of Revelation. This is the sort of "explanation"
which myth formation offers. Here too the "explanation"
suffers from both implausibility and lack of parallels.

First, note that earthquakes occur along the Syrio-African
fault approximately every ninety years. The assumption that such
an event would produce shock and trigger a unique belief in a
public revelation is naive. The many earthquakes which occurred
in the same area produced no parallel effects.

Second, in order to see how implausible the "explanation"
is, let's take it in two stages. For the first stage, imagine
that the story says of itself that it has been passed down continuously
from the time of the event. In other words, the story says: "So-and-so
many years ago the entire ancestry of your nation stood at a mountain
and heard G-d speaking to them. They were commanded to tell the
story of this event to their children, and they to their children,
and the nation in fact did this." (There actually is something
like this in the Torah itself - cf. Deut. 4:9-10, 31: 9-13, 19-21.
But I will not use this below because it is not clear and prominent
enough.) Now we have to imagine a gradual process of taking a
natural event and promoting it into a national revelation, ending
with the story that this national revelation was always known
by the nation. But before you arrive at the story of a national
revelation no one knows about it! How are we supposed to imagine
the story which says that it was always known being accepted gradually?

Now for the second stage, suppose that the story
does not say that it was passed down continuously, but that the
reader or listener will automatically assume that it will be
passed down continuously. Then we have precisely the same
problem as the last paragraph: how can a story which the listener
assumes must have been continuously known be promoted gradually?
This is the Kuzari's point: a story of a national revelation will
not be forgotten, and the listener to whom the story is being
sold knows this and will use it in evaluating the story
and deciding whether to believe it. The problem of filling
in the details of the gradual promotion of such a story is a great
obstacle to the hypothesis of myth formation for the Sinai revelation.

Now for the second problem, the lack of historical
parallels. If the belief in the revelation at Sinai is the result
of myth formation applied to a natural event, and if that is a
normal sort of thing to happen, then it ought to happen more than
once. We are not the only people in history that have witnessed
earthquakes or who saw volcanic eruptions, or to whom typhoons
took place, or tidal waves or other events that could be regarded
as supernatural. If a belief in a public revelation could be
produced by a natural event, it should have been produced more
than once. It is very suspicious to say that here is an effect
of a natural cause, a normal cause, fitting in well with human
psychology and the normal human environment, but it only happened
once in the history of the world!

This is especially true with respect to a belief
like the revelation at Sinai, for three reasons. First, a belief
in a public revelation is the strongest possible foundation for
a religion. If somebody goes up on a mountain and says that he
heard G-d speak, either you believe him or you don't believe him.
It is then open for everyone else to doubt it and to say that
he either made it up or had delusions. In fact, the vast majority
of such claims have been rejected throughout history. For every
founder of a new religion, there are thousands whose claims to
divine revelation or inspiration were ignored. It is much more
powerful logically to start out with a belief that an entire nation
heard G-d speak. Now if that kind of belief could have been
made up then it should have been made up more than once.
After all, it is logically the most sound foundation for a religion.

Second, ancient religions borrowed from one another,
they were in contact with one another, they had a similar structure;
they have the same sort of Pantheon, the same sorts of beliefs.
Why wasn't this element ever borrowed? Our belief goes back at
least three thousand years. There was a lot of travel through
our area of the world. How is it that no one picked it up?

Third, Christianity and Islam desperately need this
belief. Christianity and Islam in their early stages made strenuous
efforts to convert Jews. Now, if you are a Christian or a Moslem
missionary and you come to a Jew and you tell him that your leader
is G-d, or that your leader is a Prophet and so forth, the Jew
responds: "I don't know about your leader, all I know is
that my ancestors stood at Sinai, and you agree. You Christian,
you Moslem agree that my ancestors stood at Sinai. How can I
now abandon that? How can I contradict that?" What shall
the Christian or Moslem answer? That is one of the reasons that
they did so poorly in converting Jews. Because the Revelation
at Sinai is a foundation that is very difficult to contradict.

Now, according to myth formation there would have
been a perfect answer that the Christian or Moslem could have
given. He could have said: "You are right, your ancestors
stood at Sinai, but it happened again. Another public
revelation. All of your ancestors, five hundred years ago, stood
again at another mountain and heard the second edition, and we
have the second edition." Why did they not make up that
kind of belief? If this is the kind of belief that you can make
up, why didn't they make it up?

So, if you are working on a scenario about how the
original belief of the Revelation took place, you have an enormous
obstacle to overcome. The more plausible your scenario is, the
more difficult it is to explain why it didn't happen to anybody
else. You are sort of caught between two improbable alternatives.
Either you create a very implausible scenario so as to protect
yourself from the fact that no one else did it, but then it is
implausible as an explanation as to how it happened to us. Or
you create a very plausible scenario, in which case the question
why no one else ever did it is simply impossible to answer.

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